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The Increasing Importance of Community
Jono Bacon writes "With the success of Ubuntu and Fedora, and the advent of OpenSuSE and Freespire, are businesses and distributions paying more attention to the community? The Increasing Importance of Community discuss this change in focus. What do you all think? Is the community now more of a priority?"
It's a novel idea but "Communities of Practice" are now an enforced thing to take part in where I work. That's right, these CoPs are supposed to give us an opportunity to partake in idea creation and discussion
If I take the word "businesses" to mean literally any kind of business (not just that one operating system maker we all know and love), then I'd propose something like General Motors. Do you think General Motors values community within their company? Probably not. I'm sure they think about local communities but I doubt they're concerned with the communities within their company. That was just an example, I have nothing for or against GM.
Being able to post on a forum (anonymously, if you prefer) about anything from your working conditions to an idea you had is vital to the happiness of the workers. However, I've had bosses that I've pitched this to who just read it as a waste of company time--they feared addicts working the threads 24/7 (much like I do on Slashdot). I would prefer if they would see it as an investment in idea exchanges and employee satisfaction. Ha! That's not their concern!
Back to the original topic, I think that Linux distributions should be more concerned about their corner of the market. Microsoft is their competition. They make an amazing operating system. They aren't going to win the casual computer user by creating a community. They will win them through marketing and raising awareness. It's a cold hard thing to say but I think most of the developers for Linux should be concentrating on educating users about what they can provide. I learned about Linux in college from a friend but, looking back, there's really no reason why some flash advertisement on the side of a website couldn't have done the same.
If you're looking for reasons to get new users,
"Tired of forking money over to Microsoft?"
would probably be more effective than
"Join a community of people who will become abrasive if you're not at their level of intelligence!"
Now, if you're looking at keeping the users involved with the OS and the development of it, this community thing is the answer. I just don't think Linux distros risk losing that support. Their fanbase is extremely solid--the problem is that it is minute compared to Microsoft's.
My work here is dung.
Very much like like politicians do, businesses make an enormous show of letting it be know how much they listen to "the community" all the while screwing thier customers/the-community anytime they can get away with it if they think they can make more money doing it.
.... PS3 .... uhhhh shinnyyy!!!"]
<rant>
It's all part of the growing awareness by businesses that the world is full of blind-following, short-memory, fanboy, brand-fanatic idiots which, as long as they are being fed plenty of PR, will keep buying (not to mention singing praises to) crummy products even when they feel THAT sharp pain in their backsides.
["Sony rootkit, Sony bad, Sony bad!
</rant>
I don't think we should ever underestimate the value a community can create for an operating system. I think the Mac is a great example of this.
Not to knock ubuntu, fedora, freespire, and opensuse, but the Debian community has been around since 1993. It is a highly evolved community with established processes for handling the politics, policy, and code developed for it. It is interesting that Debian isn't even mentioned by the OP. The Debian community, IMHO, is the model for everything else.
Let the users find the bugs and develop the community version of the OS and take everything that works well and put it into your commercial offering. Seems to work for RedHat so far. But then again, they already had a strong community to begin with. Might work well for SuSE too. But Linspire? We'll see...
Without the Linux Community, I would never have been able to properly set up Ubuntu on my computer. It's nice to know that strangers are willing to get together and help complete newbs like myself get started with Linux.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
The psychology and social structure of a bunch of disparate programmers who are not on your payroll is a pill just too difficult to swallow, and one that is usually farmed to the bottom of the 'lets do this' pile.
Are we all just difficult pills? Or are we the cure to the boring workplace?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But one that will help you fix your product, not just tell you what they like and don't like. And they'll do tech support for free, too.
Hmm let me guess, version 5.0?
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
that has nothing to do with the success of fedora, the fedora foundation was trying to be a legal entity to handle the legal aspect of the distribution and it was determined it was too cumbersome to be effective
http://fedoranews.org/cms/node/583
Supplies!
I thought it was brand new. If it took off like a rocket, please link me. I'm lazy.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Being honest, I've never actually seen a concrete definition of what the word "community" in the context of Linux actually means.
However, by implication I've tended to suspect that Richard Stallman intended it to refer to his vision of a relatively small, highly insular group of individuals who, while being interested in mutual co-operation within said group, were distrustful at best (and openly contemptuous or hostile at worst) of outsiders. It also seemed to me to refer to a group environment in which a particular belief system/worldview was held, and where there was an expectation that members would rigidly enforce adherence to this worldview among other members.
If this is starting to sound like I'm referring to a cult, then to a degree, I actually think that perhaps I am. This however is merely what I have observed.
Did you at any point actually bother to maybe, ya know, RTFM?
We did. It was pretty easy actually.
I mean, you're reading now...
I'm not sure that this is a major discovery; business has always know about community. If you want
evidence of this, I'd suggest that you go to a football match (real football with round balls).
Originally, the teams came out of the communities that they represent, the football grounds
were built in the middle of housing estates. The supporters were loyal and got massively involved
in their teams.
Most of this is still true, except that season tickets have not got pretty expensive, and the
big clubs are worth millions (or billions) a year. At the end of the day, the thing which
gets people turning up again and again is not the club, not the football, but the community
of supporters.
Phil
Go ahead bitch, hit me again.
A number of linux distro and non-aligned forums are like that but even as a semi experienced Linux user I have found Ubuntu forums to be a friendly place to ask for help.
Gentoo did it best before them all - people that don't talk down to you when you have a linux question.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
The community becomes more and more important every day. Since many developers "forget" to write documentation for their applications, the end users are more and more dependent on the community to get their free stuff working. And every remark like "did you RTFM, you $%#$ing n00b?" or "go play with your Windows, loser, if you don't want to learn stuff", certainly makes a lasting impact in the mind of the user community.
I think with business that use Community as an accessory to their business will never achieve the success they hope for. Many large corporations have started adding executive blogs and these are useful but do not really engage the reader to comment, ask questions, and feel like they "matter." These kinds of attempts at community feel wrong to me - like the Leader is giving a speech or address rather than soliciting interaction. Also, it tends to feel like marketing as they only talk about their product and not other open source software and development (except to offer a competitive comparison), so it feels as you would expect, very biased.
I think if business wants to be successful in Community they need to go beyond their own corporate turf and interact with other communities outside of their .com domain, with their identity cleary visible. They should say "I work for [Company Name] and this is what I think about [This Issue]." Corporations are so wary of saying something that would make them look bad and they feel they need to control all outbound communication that this is a major road block to them ever being really accepted into the Community -- they take very little risk. Why should I -- Josephine Public -- respect what they have to say when I always have to go to their turf on their terms?
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
I have mixed feelings about this trend. On one hand, it's nice to be able to be part of a community steering your favourite distribution, that is be able to help improve it/influence where it goes.
On the other hand I don't think that it always works as good as it sounds at first. I'm a long time Linux user, and I personally think that SuSE 10.0, the first community influenced version, was laking in quality. For the very first time I got an error message box during installation (that wasn't caused by a defect medium), and I didn't understand what the error message box was about or what it wanted to tell me. It really burned into my head that I got it: I've never seen something like this in earlier SuSE releases. I remotely remember having had other issues as well. In short: I personally found the first community influenced SuSE distribution to be below normal SuSE quality.
Maybe 10.1 will be better, I will of course have a look. But it left me thinking whether it really was the right move for SuSE. Community driven distribution can work, but I don't think it's the correct way for all distributions.
It's like Wikipedia vs. Enclycopaedia Britannica: they work differently, and both models of making an encyclopaedia have their up- and down-sides. Same for making a distribution: I don't think there's an "one-size-fits-all" solution that makes everyone happy.
never underestimate the power of long-haired, bearded, smelly, tee shirted, sandelled, tin-foil hatted socialy inept condecending assholes in large groups! The truth is now that I'm 40, all of the high-school cheer leaders that were too good to talk to me in highschool have droopy breasts and four kids and a divorce and are playing white-trash in the trailer park while whining about their deadbeat ex's not paying child support. All the football jocks that gave me wedgies, have beerbellies, four kids that are near juvenile delinquents like their parents were and spend more time in the principal's office than they did when they were in school. The ones that managed to stay married spend their evenings dreading the day when the batteries for the TV remote go dead and they actualy have to get their fat asses off the couch to change the TV from pro-wrestling and NASCAR once in a while; so you'll have to forgive us when we gloat about their computer's taking 90 minutes to boot up all of the spyware and viruses so they can send a chain-Email of paris hilton upskirt to their buddies on AOL.
Post something on the forums that have been asked on every page for the last 3 months, and sometimes you get a RTFM.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
well choice is one so the fact that there is a more open feedback and availability with some of the other distro's is a good thing at the end of the day theres always going to be distro wars but the fact that there is a choice is what is needed and maybe the companies mentioned can see that the closed source , ignoring feature requests , and not meeting user request is the one thing that microsoft seem to fail on and that failing is going to eat away at there sails so at least these companies can see what needs to be done and are trying to meet that requirement they have 2 choices ether they do a good job and get more sails because of it or they do it badly and fall by the way side only the ones that meet the demands and requirements of the users will succeed , so there following the sails and distribution methods that make them accepted , and its important that they do in the long term maybe microsoft pattented the busness model that prevents them not doing it :)
The community always was important. Some folks just forgot that or were blinded by greed.
:v)
Vik
One year ago I was a 'nix n00b. Now after posts galore I'm a happy Fedora user who has managed to migrate everything over to 'Nix aside from my media centre (damn proprietary remote controls LOL) and games (DOH) W/out the happy helpful Fedora community I would not have been able to learn more about Nix in a year than 8 years of M$ (and I am an old school DOS 5.0 man who spent their first month of PC usage reading the DOS manual) The community is one of the BIGGEST factors in getting new users into 'Nix + letting us explore these digital sandboxes. The squillions of how-tos and FAQs around are a testament to that. WHen u take a step back its actually quite impressive how one can run a fully featured enterprise solution on nothing but whiteboxes and free software (well u won't quite get active directory LOL not unless you're an LDAP guru - doh) and large dollops of community goodwill. I'm no programmer (never was) but I'm a dedicated techie and I now take the time to try to help newbies troubleshoot, just like how experienced FEdora users helped me troubleshoot my new install only a short 12 months ago. Its a virtuous cycle of participation and IMHO the biggest strength of the open source movement. If you're in any doubt, just check out all the other Net forums where people ask n00b questions about Windoze and watch the insufferably arrogant responses from the script kiddies (who think they're l33t coz they can install codecs by double clicking on an .exe file)
Then again I've never had the privilege of participating in a Debian forum LOL
Editors have unlimited mod points; just FYI. It's no skin off their ass to keep this up all day.
I think transparency is important for both...
God and religion are distinct
It's true not just in open Linux / open source - it's true everywhere now.
As a consultant - all I do is help startups and organizations really "get" this whole community thing. Many \
factors are pushing it, but mostly increased communication.
The editors don't bother to read the FAs so I'd be surprised they read at the comments. Also, my initial comment is a flamebait only if the person reading it is a fanboy who can't accept criticism.
More than 48 hours since being posted, an item titled " The Increasing Importance of Community" on Slashdot has a grand total of 68 comments - less than a quarter that of the following article about some arcane Sun filesystem maybe being ported to Apple. Holy shit.
Pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Community decay at it's very finest.
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